Hear Rooms II

collective exhibition of sound art

A selection of multi-channel compositions realized by seven international sound artists will be offered to local audience during a two day happening.
The programme will feature the best proposals submitted to Spazioersetti in response to our Open call for works. Works will be played in sequence and divided by short intervals. Sequence is repeated in loop.

PROGRAMME

Adam Basanta (CA)

A Room Listening to Itself

8 – channel sound installation (2015)

Feedback occurs when output of a system is directed back into its input. As output continuously funnels into the input – which in turn routes the signal back to the output, on and on ad infinitum – the system reaches an equilibrium in which notions of cause and effect are rendered meaningless.
In A Room Listening to Itself, sound is produced exclusively through amplification techniques which “make audible” the physical relationships between microphones, reclaimed speaker cones, and the gallery’s surrounding acoustic environment. Using the acoustic phenomena of tuned microphone feedback alongside recursive amplification networks, the gallery space is turned into a giant resonator that amplifies both acoustic activity and inactivity as a product of spatial relationships. Custom-built computer software constantly re-calibrates the room to ever-changing acoustic situations, aiming for a sonic equilibrium that remains out of reach.
For Hear Rooms II, an 8 channel live recording of the installation is presented. This recording is available to purchase in stereo from Cassauna Records.

A Room Listening to Itself is made possible by financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Adam Basanta (b. 1985) is a Montreal-based sound artist, composer, and performer of experimental music. His work traverses sound installations, electroacoustic and instrumental composition, site-specific interventions, and laptop performance. Across disciplines and media, he interrogates intersections between conceptual and sensorial dimensions of listening, instabilities of instrumentality, and means with which site and space can be articulated. [ adambasanta.com ]

Agathe Simon (FR)

Antarctic Music

Acousmatic composition 5.1 (2014 – 18′)

Agathe Simon has composed Antarctic Music with voices of people from all continents and sounds she has recorded in Antarctica in 2014.

Antarctic Music is a tribute to Gabriela Conti, the famous French-Argentine writer who died in a snow storm in 2010, close to South Pole. The text is based on excerpts of her travelogue during ‘2048 Expedition’. Antarctic Music is part of the exhibition Antarctica by Agathe Simon : www.agathesimon.com/antarctica

in collaboration with

National Direction of Antarctica of Argentinian government
French Institute of Argentina
Visby International Centre for Composers
Swedish Arts Grants Committee
International City of Arts

Agathe Simon is a French artist born in 1977. She lives and works in Paris. A Ph.D. recipient from the Sorbonne University and CNSMDP, she is frequently invited abroad for exhibitions and creative residencies. She taught for several years at the Universities Paris IV, Paris VII and Cergy-Pontoise. [ agathesimon.com ]

DEKJ (MX/DE)

e__xo

8-channel generative sound installation

A re-evaluation of the significance and relevance of environment through its reflective characteristics; the sense of proximity overtaken by its immediate remoteness, the rigidity of boundarization and borderization modified until the point of inconsistence, the induced obtuseness of spatial compression and decompression as an analogy for the incongruity of freedom as a conferred state and the discrepancy between open and close.
The behaviour of the reverberation on each signal of the piece is set to modulate the upcoming one, although partly stochastic, patterns emerge as the piece unfolds, deriving in the formation of “edges” for the sonic fence.

DEKJ functions as an ongoing project studying sound as the primary axis of actual dynamics, behaviour and instances. Considering the sonic and vibrational milieu as a representative for balance, transgression, violation, that also affects physical composition and the notion of structured spaces. [ dekj.org ]

Kg Augenstern (DE)

SOW Km 22.0 – scratching a line (2016)

8-channel audio installation

The artist group Kg Augenstern (Christiane Prehn and Wolfgang Meyer) have lived and worked on the ship Anuschka for many years.
Since 2014 the MS Anuschka is traveling on european waterways in France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and Germany. On the way, the crew examines numerous bridges, spanning rivers and canals. Using tentacles installed on board to scratch the individual soundprofile of each bridge, the ship turns into a sensitive, perceiving and sounding laboratory interacting with the territory.

Entering central Berlin from the east on river Spree, one has to pass under a large concrete bridge, the Elsenbruecke. Under the bridge, there is a camp of homeless people living in several tents despite the winter tempering.
For Spazioersetti, Kg Augenstern scratched this bridge very slowly.

Kg Augenstern works in the field of audiovisuall/ audiokinetic installation, performance and video.
Christiane Prehn: University of fine arts Stuttgart, artist, sculpturor, film director
Wolfgang Meyer: musician, soundart, videos, film music [ facebook/KG-Augenstern ]

Kristina Wolfe (DK/US)

Ebbinge

8 – channel composition (2015 – 17′)

Ebbinge is a work for 8 double basses. It was created by the conjuring and live manipulation of flocking motion using hand gestures which was then recorded on 8 double basses.

Kristina Wolfe is a composer, electronic musician, thing-maker, and multi-instrumentalist. Born in Florida, Wolfe is of Danish and American heritage, and spent many of her formative years wandering through the forests of Mols Bjerge (near the city of Århus) in Denmark, listening to the sounds of space and place. She was a composition fellow at Bang-On-A-Can Summer Festival at MASS MoCA, will be an ISCM VICC Composer-In-Residence in 2017, and was awarded a MATA commission. She was also awarded honorable mention for the 2014 Pauline Oliveros Prize, a winner for the 2016 Viol Composition Competition (Viola da Gamba Society) and first prize in the Villiers 2016 New Works Composition Competition.

Matteo Crivella (IT)

Quasidrone

Audio installazione per 8 canali

Quasidrone is a work of 8 tracks for 8 speakers. Tracks play simultaneously in a quasi-just intonation on the fundamental of 40Hz which changing harmonics, in a set of 5 values, never fall on the line of the fundamental at the same time generating a ceaseless mutation sonic structure. In the listening room the drone divided in 8 tracks fill the space hetegeneously allowing the listener to explore its multi-faceted architecture in relation to the listening position.

«I was born in 1980 and I’m based in Milan. My work is focused on Sound, designing systems integrating electronics and physical behaviors of matter as components of a larger cybernetic configuration with the purpose to avoid too much human results and stop formalism research in favor of a result that emerges from the choices made during the design of the system.» [ matteocrivella.com ]

J&B (NL)

industrial lounge

8 channel audio installation

Industrial lounge is an 8 channel audio installation, comprising of industrial sounds and choir singing. The industrial thumps define the space. You’re in the middle of an industrial furnace, with mythical proportions.
But the industrial revolution is long behind us. The heavy industrial areas, once the proud regions in Europe, are now in decay. Is the choir singing a European requiem?

J&B is a Rotterdam based artist collective, founded in 2015 by members who have earned their spurs in art and science. Instead of cheap booze, J&B dishes up some disturbing political issues. Is there beauty in decay, even in moral decay? J&B hijacks the Vanitas tradition and lets Western society comment on itself.